| Chapter 1: | The Aesthetics of Spectrality |
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Chapter 1
The Aesthetics of Spectrality
The Train Arriving at La Ciotat
On a bright day in 1895, or perhaps it was in the winter of 1896, a train pulled diagonally into the town of La Ciotat on the Mediterranean coast of France. There is a faint blur of steam, and the shadow of the train accompanies it as the sun, invisible but for its effects, shines down from the upper left. The day is in full swing. The waiting passengers randomly mill about by the tracks—there is no platform yet—as they prepare to greet those passengers arriving from elsewhere or to board the train themselves to travel beyond the familiar boundaries of La Ciotat. At least some of them, including members of the Lumière family—Louis’s mother, Josephine; one of his sisters; and his niece, Marlene Koehler—were simply waiting to be filmed. Waiting to appear on film and from film, and, because it is built into the function of film, to be repeated as if they were ghosts that were fated to reappear on strange screens, on pixilated monitors. How could they have known their futures?